Tag: improve

Our in-house development projects are well covered for Unit and Frontend tests since we adopted BDD (behat) and a bit of TDD (phpspec).

However, creating lots of tests has an impact downstream on our shared Gitlab CI server. Every-time we push a new set of changes to GitLab the tests are taking 30mins to complete and beginning to slow us down.

So here are our 3 easy tips to speed up your test runner and reduce the time it takes to run a full test run.

Today I attended some training on Excellent Customer Service provided by the University.

The reason I signed up was because some of the work I’ve taken over here for providing Moodle Gradebook support is not “so hot” right now. It feels like we’re failing on some really basic stuff, which is frustrating to both me and obviusly the staff. Also, by failing on the basics, it knocking effect of WOW things, like custom code of the gradebook.

To be fair, a lot of the stuff I have taken on is going pretty well and the tutors seem very happy with my Project Management and Custom coding. But, I still want to be doing better in the areas I’m presently weakest in, whether they are inherited problems or brand new.

The first things to learn was, “who is my customer?”, Because yes, my work affects the students too, I did wonder if they were my customer. However, nope. My work sits in a chain of support and my direct customer is the staff I deal with on a day to day basis.

Then we used a very useful model and excercise, the Kano Model. It splits and identifies different parts of your service from Basic, Satisfactory and WOW.

It turns out after doing the excercise, I identified loads of basics, but had trouble picking anything above that. Which is becuase, in a few ways the service isn’t even hitting the basics, so there’s no point offering WOWs. The analogy we were given was, “With a hotel, your basics are Bed, Clean room & Toilet. So if none of those basics are met, you wouldn’t be so overly happy with a WOW of champagne on arrival”.